Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Welcome, everyone. I am so excited about today’s interview because today I have two co-creators of an ongoing documentary initiative called Citizen Power, which is a followup to the 2018 PBS documentary American Creed. Citizen Power explores American idealism and activism from a range of young adult perspectives. Today I have with me Jonathan Blair and Sam Schimmel, who are both young, rural leaders doing the important work of tending to the heartbeat of their local communities in really expansive and thoughtful and unique ways. Jonathan Blair joins us from Pippa Passes in Appalachia, Kentucky, where he’s focused on providing pathways to educational leadership for mountain people, including children of coal miners. Sam Schimmel is part of the Kenaitze tribe in Kenai, Alaska, and the tribe’s movement to restore Indigenous rights to subsistence fishing and economic development in ways that are in alignment with community values. 

There’s a third co-creator of this initiative as well, Jace Charger. Unfortunately, Jace couldn’t join us today due to those pesky rural broadband issues that we’re all familiar with, but I wanted to introduce Jace anyway. They are the co-founder of the very first protest camp at Standing Rock and continue the work of protecting land and water through resistance, civil disobedience, and intergenerational solidarity on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Jonathan, Jace, and Sam have documented their efforts recently through photographic essays with support from Working Assumptions, which is a program that engages young people in the intersections of work, family, and care in their own lives. I’m so excited that all three of these folks are going to share their photography with audiences on January 19th through the Connecting Our Heartland’s virtual event, which is co-produced by the Rural Assembly and will feature these three in conversation with leading civic scholars Danielle Allen, Eric Liu, and David Kennedy. 

That’s what we can expect today. We’re going to have a conversation with Sam and Jonathan. We’ll miss Jace, but we’ll catch up with Jace again soon. I want to talk to Sam and Jonathan about what it is that they carry with them, their inspirations, their fears, their hopes for the future of their communities. I want to give you a slight preview into what you can expect at the January 19th event. I’m really eager to kickstart this conversation by giving folks a better sense of where you live, where you come from, and what it is that fuels your fire. So I wanted to go around the horn and just ask you to give a brief introduction of yourself, and tell us something that you would like us to know about where you come from. What is important to you, what is most important to you, perhaps, about your community? Sam, do you mind kicking us off 

Sam Schimmel: 

I absolutely can. Once again, yeah, thank you for having us on today. [foreign language 00:03:09]. Hello, everybody. I’m Sam Schimmel. I’m Kenaitze and Siberian Yupik, from Kenai, Alaska. I’m the founder of Operation Fish Drop and a current law student at Georgetown. Really, what sets my home apart from other places is the connection to our food. You go into any house. You go into any community center. You see exactly where your food comes from. It’s not isolated. It doesn’t come in a package. It doesn’t come from a grocery store. It comes directly from the ocean. It comes directly from our rivers and from our land. I think that is really what sets our community apart because it forces you to have a deeper understanding of the environment around you. It forces us to rely on our traditions and our culture in order to be able to feed our families and to survive. I think that’s what really is special about our place. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Thank you so much. Jonathan, how about you? 

Jonathan Blair: 

Yeah. Thank you, Whitney. It’s great to be here. My name is Jonathan Blair. I currently go to college at Alice Lloyd College in Appalachia, Kentucky, Pippa Passes, in which I study social studies education. My college and my community are essentially the same thing, so I’m just going kind of delve into that. We offer a compulsory work study program here, in which each student works alongside their education, which teaches many important values such as time management. This is a really great way to move the Appalachian people forward into education because everyone has such strong blue-collar roots, with coal mining and everything else that originated in these hills. Now they can apply and transition that to acquiring a higher education. That’s really my mission, is to further educate the people of this region in order to further the region itself. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Thank you for that. All of you, I know, have been working over the past year, in fact, on the Citizen Power Project alongside Citizen Film. You’ve also been doing, in tandem with that, a photographic essay that brings another dimension, I think, to the stories all three of you shared, about what’s important to you about your communities. I was wondering today, especially as I was looking at Sam Schimmel’s photographic essay, which is already up on The Daily Yonder. Looking at those pictures that you’ve taken of the work and the life that’s happening in your community, I wonder if looking through the camera lens keyed you into something new or different, or illuminated something for you that you hadn’t really taken in before you had that camera in your hand. 

Sam Schimmel: 

The photo-taking journey that I’ve been on started with Operation Fish Drop. That was a food security program that was really aimed at ensuring Alaska Native elders and families had access to subsistence food. You saw during the pandemic, people getting cut off from those subsistence food networks, people not being able to leave, people not being able to go home, and people not being able to fish. Compound those restrictions with poor salmon returns, and you saw that people’s freezers were empty. During that project we were able to get about 25,000 pounds of salmon together and give that out to community members. It was really important to be able to document it, mainly because it was funded by grant money and you have to have grant reporting. People always want to see pictures. 

It was something that I struggled with at first, figuring out how you take a photo that embodies the feeling of our community when we have our traditional food. How do you demonstrate and capture that in a way that’s positively reflective of our community, that puts forward the message that we want put forward, and that doesn’t leave room for interpretation. It’s very explicit. I come from a marine mammal hunting community. We’re often painted in a poor light because of it. Whenever we take pictures of our subsistence, whenever we take pictures of our community eating together, you have to be very careful about how you do it. 

Working with Citizen Film to document what was going on down in the Kenai and with my community down there, it was just a continuation of that, but it was also facing inward as well. The project that we put together, we want to make a movie out of it because one of our elders shows us how to smoke salmon in the traditional way during it. As we launch into this next year, we have our school open for the first time, our tribal school, one of the first tribal schools in Alaska, open, and we want to start integrating that cultural education component into our school. 

For a long time I really thought photographers as quite annoying people, shoving cameras in everybody’s faces, and was always somebody doing, not taking pictures, not sitting back. So it was definitely an adjustment to step back, and then also a greater realization of the role that good photography can play, just because a lot of times it doesn’t play the best one for our Indigenous communities. You see things like … What do they call that? Grief tourism or whatever it is, trauma dumping or trauma porn. Our Native communities, photographers capitalizing on the situation that our communities are in, in order to further their own career and their own standing. When you have a Native person behind the camera, that doesn’t happen. You’re portraying that story of strength, that story of tradition, that story of resilience that is core to our community. It really is, I think, helpful. It’s definitely been super interesting. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Sam, is there a photo in particular? Because yours has already published, your photo essay, is there a photo in particular that stands out to you, that you could describe to us, that captures that authenticity and that moment? 

Sam Schimmel: 

One of the ones that stands out in my memory is one where you see my two aunts holding a piece of salmon. My Aunt Marianne is wrapping cotton twine around it for it to be hung. My Aunt Ronette is dealing which way the scales go to ensure that it’s correct. I think what that picture symbolizes is not so much just two women in a kitchen making salmon, but the transition of knowledge from elders to younger people. For a long time, our traditions, they short circuited our parents’ generation. They short circuited our parents’ generation in that their parents didn’t teach them. But my grandparents did teach us, my generation. 

There’s this lost generation that was born between the 1960s and the 1980s, where it wasn’t a good thing to be Native. I think for our Indigenous communities, it was a long time. There’s a lot of stigma around being Indigenous, but I think that we’ve come past that, really, to the point where we used to be ashamed to be Native, but now there’s people pretending to be us. Really, what that photo symbolizes is that transition of knowledge to that lost generation, something that’s super important. So I think that’s really the one that stands out in my mind. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

That’s beautiful. Jonathan, what about you? What’s it been like to be behind the camera and the story you’re trying to tell? 

Jonathan Blair: 

Being from a region that very often gets painted in a negative light definitely makes it different to try to portray that story. But when it’s an Appalachian holding the camera in Appalachia, that is a completely different story because so many people have come into the region and made hillbilly elegies or whatever you want to call it, just painting the people as cynical and stupid, when, in reality, it couldn’t be further from that. But the one thing that being on that side of the camera really proved to me is that pictures are a universal language. That’s something that anyone in the world can look at and somewhat understand, given a little context. To be able to show a region that very seldom gets portrayed in a positive light, in terms of a worldview, it just felt very powerful to be able to do that and to show that there is a large movement here to further the area and further the education of the people in this area. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

That’s wonderful. We’ll be right back after this from The Daily Yonder. 

Xandr Brown: 

Hi, I’m Xandr Brown with The Daily Yonder. Check out The Yonder Report, the weekly podcast rounding up the latest rural news. Produced by The Daily Yonder and Public News Service, you can listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Now back to Everywhere Radio. I wanted to ask Jonathan, if you wouldn’t mind, telling us a little bit about how you and your community have been coping since the major flood that hit Eastern Kentucky in 2022. Right before this we started this podcast, we were all talking about FEMA and the frustrations around getting the right aid to the people who need it. But I wonder how things have been in your community and your region. 

Jonathan Blair: 

Yeah. The flood was absolutely devastating. It came overnight, something completely unexpected. It was not even necessarily really forecasted in the weather. The rain clouds just parked themselves here and stayed for a while. There was absolute total devastation all around my community. However, thankfully, right here in Pippa Passes, the campus slash the town itself, there wasn’t so much damage. We just had minimal damage to one building. A lot of creek banks eroded and, thankfully, no lives lost. But 10 minutes away in any direction, there was absolute total devastation. 

Thankfully, Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia as a whole, and a lot of people from all around the country were able to pull together and do what we could to fix this in as timely a manner as possible to get people back on their feet. I mean, that’s what we do here. We don’t do handouts. We do hand-ups. We do what it takes to get people on their feet and just get everybody … It’ll never be completely normal again. Not at all. You can look physically and see that, and in the hearts of people as well. But people pulled together well, and we’re moving right along. It’s not the way it used to be, but maybe that’s not the point. We’re just trying to build back better in every way possible. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Sam, as you are working to reclaim Indigenous rights to subsistence farming, to fishing, to the traditional ways of life, how is Georgetown Law shaping how you’re showing up in this movement, in this effort? 

Sam Schimmel: 

I think when it comes to our subsistence and our hunting and fishing, there’s a very important role that the law plays. We have an agreement through ANCSA with the US government that says we’re allowed to hunt and fish. We have to be able to enforce that agreement in order for it to remain in effect. One of the key components of that is being able to notify and sue the government when those rights are infringed. That’s where I see law coming into it. 

Beyond that, when it comes to our tribes and the ability to have sovereignty, you need to have economic sovereignty in order to really be sovereign. If you’re going to the government every six or eight months or every year and saying, “Hey, we need you to fund these things, we need you to do these things,” then you’re not truly independent. You’re not truly sovereign. I think you saw that most recently with the Indian Health Service appropriation, where the government hadn’t put through a spending bill, so Indian Health Service was getting ready to run out of money, which means that healthcare in Indian country was no longer going to be existent. A lot of people remember when the federal government shut down the last time, but few people know that it meant that Indian Health Service also shut down. In order to be independent, you have to be economically independent. 

One of the things that you need in order to have a strong robust economy is a nation of laws. Being able to build tribal law in such a way as to provide economic opportunity for outside business and internal entrepreneurship is crucially important to them. We’re not allowed to tax our reservations or our Native allotments, so we need to figure out how to generate revenue outside of taxation. Really, being able to attract business through favorable legal conditions is one of the ways that needs to happen. That’s really what I’m working on. That plays a larger role within the whole sovereignty question and the ability of us to enforce our rights. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I’m also wondering, as you all are co-creators of the Citizen Power documentary initiative, I mean, you all are helping us engage with questions that I think we’re all grappling with. All of us are struggling with in our own zip codes and contexts about what it means to be a citizen. What does freedom really entail? How do we live in a pluralistic society and flourish? How do we address injustices that are ages old and still with us today? All of those things, those are really big questions that we all carry with us. I see you all through your essays, your work, not shying away from really digging in there. I just wonder, what is that spark that keeps you pursuing answers to these questions or keeps you engaging with them? Is it relationships? Well, I don’t want to put words into your mouth. What is it that keeps you all going and working on these big, big issues? 

Sam Schimmel: 

In our Native community, we have this idea of reciprocity. Our elders teach us our traditions so that we can hunt and fish. In turn, we borrow those traditions from them, and we use them to feed them. We use those traditions to hunt and fish for them and for our families. Then we pass them down to our children, and they hold them, and then they do the same to us. A part of that is ensuring that there’s proper management of our resources, that access remains to those resources, namely fish and marine mammals, and land mammals as well. When it comes to our community, there’s this traditional expectation of excellence. Where I come from, it gets down to 40 and 50 below zero in the wintertime. Failure is not an option. In our traditional society, if you failed, you died. That carries through to this day. When it comes to ensuring that we keep our rights and that we keep our subsistence and we maintain our foods, there is no option to fail. There isn’t an option to not work on it. 

I always remember, well, one of my cousins wrote when it was Senator Murkowski who came out to the village schools and asked them what climate change means. This was probably about seven years ago. She came out and asked them all to write on a piece of paper, and these are second graders, and asked them, “What does climate change mean to you?” One of my cousins, when she was six, she wrote, “I’m worried there will be no ice and that we will have nothing to eat.” So when trying to achieve the goal of having a happy and healthy community, you need to think about what’s our core needs? Our core needs are food, shelter, and water. We don’t have clean water, but we should darn well keep our good food and our shelter, and work to get that clean water. A part of that is sitting in an uncomfortable position of always fighting for change, always fighting for more. 

I just remember one of my elders, we would fish for salmon on the beach in the summertime, and we’d caught a bunch of fish and cleaned them. I was a little kid. I was seven or eight years old. We’d cleaned all these fish, and I said, “Well, I think we’re done now.” Michael looked down at me and said, “No, we’re not done yet. There’s always more.” So when it comes to advocacy, when it comes to working for our peoples, there’s always more. You’re never done. You just have to keep working. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Jonathan, how about you? What has Sam shared that maybe sparked something for you, or what would you like to tell us about what it is that keeps you going? 

Jonathan Blair: 

Well, within Appalachia, at least since major immigration to the area and introduction of the coal industry, there’s always been a sense of survival. It was never really flourishing at all here. It can still be argued that, with the exception of a few major cities, nothing exceptional happened economically. Even though there has been generational improvement, which is something that we seek more and more, our great-grandparents really, really struggled. My great-grandfather hiked five miles across the hill at 4:00 a.m. every morning to go to the coal mines, got home in the evening, tended to the garden, tended to the farm, got in bed, and did the same thing again. It’s not just an area code. That’s something that many rural people have experienced. 

Appalachia especially, there’s always been a sense of survival here. I think moving generationally past that sense of survival to a way of sustainability, in that, of furthering industry here, just modernizing, furthering education, there’s just a sense of generational improvement. I think that’s what we strive for here, is not having the same struggles that our parents and our grandparents and even some of us had. It’s moving past that to a better quality of life, which we are doing quite well at this point. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I have one more question for you all about hope and about what gives you hope. We know that the stakes are high, and the hills we climb are steep. I wonder, what do you see happening right now, either in your communities or in this country, that’s giving you a sense of hope for the future, where we’re flourishing and not just surviving, as Jonathan said? 

Jonathan Blair: 

I would say the hope here, at least that I’ve experienced, and this project has helped enhance that because it has pushed me to see it through a lens that’s not my own, in a way. I think that what gives me hope is just seeing the desire for generational improvement, the desire for higher education within my peers. People pull together from as far as Manila, Philippines, to five minutes down the road, all seeking to stay in and better this area, because they see just how unique it is and how the stereotypes aren’t true. It’s not a bunch of dumb hillbillies and cynical people. It’s people who have a lot of heart, and it’s one big family. There’s a lot of love in these mountains. That’s very obvious once you just come and stay a while. 

I would say just seeing it in practice, just taking a look at the process that I helped create here, and just seeing the desire of people to improve themselves, to improve their families, to improve this region, and to stay here, not to run to Detroit or Cincinnati when there’s no work, to build work here. I think I see that in myself. I see that in my peers now that I’ve looked away, took a step back and looked at it from another situation. I see it in the people. 

Sam Schimmel: 

Yeah. I think you’re right. It is that push for generational improvement, but I think what really gives me hope from my community is the reality that our young people are interested. Our young people are no longer sitting down and just taking what’s dished out to them. They’re getting up, and they’re learning. They’re working. They are organizing. Outside of our young people, we’re finally seeing the situation in Alaska get to a point that is not good with our natural resources. You’re seeing the salmon runs that the people in the Yukon rely on being decimated, their fisheries being closed. But what is happening is that our tribes are coming together and having unity. They’re having unity and working together on common issues. That way, when we put all of our efforts into one thing and we speak with a single voice, we’re always listened to. 

If we can be divided up, then you can divide us all up, and we’re not listened to. But things have gotten to the point where we’re working together with each other. That might look like something that is bad, but I’m just reminded of the words of an elder. When thinking about Operation Fish drop, we had a number of different calls about climate change and what it meant to communities across the state. There was an old woman, an elder from St. Mary’s or Point Hope, I can’t remember which village, but she said, “When I was a little girl, we were caribou people. We hunted caribou and ate caribou.” She said, “As I got older, those caribou moved further and further north until there were no caribou, and we were no longer caribou people.” Then she said, “But when they moved further to the north, moose came in from the south. Now we eat moose, and we’re moose people. If we had been too busy watching the caribou leave, we would’ve never seen the moose come in.” 

I think that the changes that we’re seeing and the shifts that we’re having are our moose. As long as we keep our eyes out for it, we won’t miss it, and we won’t go hungry. We’ll always be taken care of, and we’ll always take care of ourselves. There is a resiliency that is in our communities. We walked across the ice bridge from Siberia, killed wooly mammoths, and carved out our homes in some of the most inhospitable environments on the planet. If you didn’t know what you were doing, you died. When it comes to the challenges that sit in front of us, they’re nothing to the ones that we’ve already faced. Knowing that our traditions are our future allows us to be resilient even when things don’t look that great, because I’m sure that they’ve been worse. I know that they’ve been worse. So that’s what gives me hope. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Thank you both for your wisdom and for sharing your love of your place with us in words and images. I’m really excited about this event on January 19th. Before I let you go, one more question I ask everyone on this podcast. It’s one of my favorites because it is also revealing. I’m wondering what piece of media are you listening to right now or watching or taking in that is pumping you up, making you happy? Maybe it’s something that you want to share with the rest of the country? 

Sam Schimmel: 

I think the most inspirational piece of media coming out right now is coming from Alice Glenn out of Alaska in her podcast, Coffee and Quaq. Q-U-A-K. That means frozen meat in Inupiaq. I think, really, that captures what’s going on in my community, in the state of Alaska and across Native country, especially in Alaska. I think that she does a really wonderful job of portraying the realities of our rural communities. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

That’s great. Can we listen to it wherever podcasts are available, basically? 

Sam Schimmel: 

Yeah, I think so. I listen to it on Spotify, but I’m sure you can find it anywhere else. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Awesome. 

Jonathan Blair: 

Well, this is a little narrow, but there’s really never a lot produced out of Appalachia. So I would say that something right now that really gives me hope for media coming out of the region, I mean, is this project that we’ve done, what we’re working on. This is the most exposure that Eastern Kentucky’s got since Stranger with a Camera, if you’re familiar with that. That was for locals killing the camera crew. I mean, this is the first bit of positive exposure that we’ve gotten in the region in a long time. I’m really glad to have been a part of that, to be a part of that. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

That’s wonderful. Next week is the Connecting Our Heartlands event, January 19th. It’s a free virtual event that’s aimed at rural leaders and advocates and the rural curious. It’s aimed at anyone, really, who’s thinking deeply about some of those questions about American democracy, and how do we do this life together, and interrogating the idea of an American creed. Again, we’ll have Eric Liu there, Danielle Allen, and David Kennedy, all incredible civic scholars. They will join Sam and Jonathan and Jace, who was unable to join our conversation today. But all three will be engaged with these civic scholars. I’m really looking forward to the event. Again, it’s free. It’s virtual. You can go to the Rural Assembly website to sign up. Sam and Jonathan, thank you so much for being here today. It was wonderful to talk to you. 

Sam Schimmel: 

Thank you for having us. 

Jonathan Blair: 

Yeah, thank you for having us. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

If you enjoyed Everywhere Radio, we’d love for you to consider subscribing to the General Rural Assembly Newsletter, where we promote new offerings from the assembly and amplify the good work of our many partners across the country. We also have an advocacy newsletter that comes to inboxes on Mondays to help you start each week with a quick take on the top issues that we’re tracking across the nation, everything from broadband policy to reproductive justice. Just head over to RuralAssembly.org to sign up. If you’re a true fan of Everywhere Radio, please let us know by rating us wherever you get your podcast. If this isn’t your cup of tea, no biggie. It’s fine. We’d like to thank our media partner, The Daily Yonder. Everywhere Radio is a production of the Rural Assembly. Our senior producer is Joel Cohen. Our associate producers are Xandr Brown and Teresa Collins. Anya Slepyan is our assistant producer. We’re grateful for the love and support of the whole team at the Center for Rural Strategies. Love you, mean it. You can be anywhere. We’ll be everywhere. 

Register for Connecting Our Heartlands at www.ruralassembly.org/heartlands.